How do you decide where to eat?

Most tools hand you a ranked list of thirty restaurants, which moves the work rather than doing it. Savor Scout takes your craving and location and returns one restaurant, showing its match score, what it beat, and the evidence behind the pick.

Yes. Searching is free, no app download is required, and you can run one search without creating an account.

How is Savor Scout different from Google Maps or Yelp?

Maps and Yelp are directories that rank everything and leave the deciding to you. Savor Scout makes the call. It reads menus and reviews for the specific dish you asked about rather than ranking places by overall star average, and it shows its reasoning. Its place data comes from the same public sources, so the difference is the selection, not the data.

Savor Scout › Eating out with a restriction › soy-free

Eating out with a soy allergy

Soy is easy to spot in tofu and soy sauce and much harder to spot everywhere else: in bread, marinades, vegetable oil blends, mayonnaise, chocolate and countless processed ingredients restaurants buy in.

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What actually goes wrong

The obvious sources are East and Southeast Asian: soy sauce, miso, tofu, edamame, tempeh, teriyaki and hoisin. Those are easy to identify. The hard part is that soy appears in many processed ingredients — bread, buns, bouillon, salad dressings, mayonnaise, margarine, and soy lecithin in chocolate and baked goods.

Soybean oil is a special case. Highly refined soybean oil is often tolerated by people with soy allergy because the refining removes most of the protein, but cold-pressed or expeller-pressed soy oil is not, and allergists differ in their advice. This is a question for your own allergist.

Vegetarian and vegan restaurants are often harder rather than easier, because tofu, tempeh, soy milk and soy-based meat substitutes are central to many plant-based menus.

What to ask, and how

Is there soy sauce in the marinade or sauce? — Including teriyaki, hoisin and many glazes.
What oil do you fry in? — And whether it's refined — then check with your allergist.
Is the bread or bun made with soy? — Many commercial breads include soy flour or lecithin.
Is the dressing or mayo made in-house? — Bought-in versions often contain soy.
Are meat substitutes soy-based? — At vegetarian and vegan restaurants.

Which cuisines make this easier

Easier — Mexican (corn tortillas, grilled meat and salsas), Indian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean, Ethiopian, Peruvian and Latin American grills, steakhouses — where soy is not a foundational ingredient. Simple grilled food with oil you've checked.
Harder — Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese and Indonesian cooking, where soy sauce or soy pastes are fundamental. Fast food and bakeries, where soy appears in bought-in ingredients. Many vegan restaurants.

How Savor Scout helps

Savor Scout reads menus and reviews for soy-free, allergy-aware and from-scratch kitchens, which narrows the field. Kitchens that cook from scratch are generally better able to tell you exactly what's in a dish.

What this does not do. Soy in bought-in breads, oils and sauces is not on any menu. Call ahead and ask specific questions.

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Cuisines worth reading up on

Mexican food, Indian food, Mediterranean food, steak

Situations where this comes up: where to eat with picky eaters, where to take the team for lunch, where to eat with a big group.